Word: jatropha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Everyone in Kibwezi, a village in southeastern Kenya parched by four years of drought, remembers the promises. It all started in 2000, when the government started preaching the word about a plant called jatropha curcas. That surprised people in Kibwezi because everyone already knew about Jatropha - it's a weed. Sometimes people planted it to fence off their farms, but usually they just ignored...
...government told the farmers, however, that jatropha seeds can be pressed to make biofuel and that scientists believed the plant's seeds contained more oil than other biofuel crops. Even better, the government said, jatropha needed little tending. All you had to do was stick it in the ground and watch it grow. Best of all for Kibwezi, a place that's frequently stricken by drought, scientists believed that the plant thrived on arid land. Convinced they could reap large profits from the plant in the global craze for alternative energy sources, hundreds of farmers turned over acres of their...
...Peter Munyao, a village elder, is one of the farmers who experimented with the new crop. He planted jatropha in 2006 and encouraged other farmers to follow his lead. But today, the plants on his farm have all dried up and lost their seeds and leaves. "The people who did the promotion for jatropha had not done [their] research ... because we have realized that the crop is getting moisture stress just like any other crop," he says. A study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Washington-based scientific journal, found that jatropha actually...
...Read "Biofuel Gone Bad: Burma's Atrophying Jatropha...
...Rangoon, I watched on television as generals in oversized camouflage hats were pictured shoveling earth to plant jatropha seedlings. Burmese state television shows an inordinate number of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and ground-breaking rituals, in which military men inaugurate the latest project and broadcasters congratulate their efforts. Eventually, as so often happens in Rangoon, the power failed and the T.V. screen went black. Biodiesel may already be contributing to a green solution in some parts of the world, but it hasn't saved Burma...